ICICI Bank today announced that it has on-boarded 70 leading companies on ‘CorpConnect’, the digital platform that it launched last year to enable corporates to undertake instant payments and collections to/from their channel partners.
‘CorpConnect’, a first-of-its-kind initiative, also offers instant and collateral-free digital channel financing solutions such as dealer finance for distributors and vendor finance/ reverse factoring for suppliers.
The list of these companies includes ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India Ltd., Asian Paints Ltd., Blue Star Ltd., Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals Ltd., Exide Industries Ltd., Hero Cycles Ltd., Hindustan Unilever Ltd., Kansai Nerolac Paints Ltd., Nayara Energy Ltd., Orient Electric Ltd., Somany Ceramics Ltd., V-Guard Industries Ltd. and Voltas Ltd. (in alphabetical order) among others. These companies– many of them are members of the ‘S&P BSE 200 Index’– represent various industries namely FMCG, consumer durables, auto ancillaries, steel, oil, cement, textiles, paints, tiles/ sanitary wares, pipes, chemicals, engineering goods, and agriculture commodities.
Through ‘CorpConnet’, companies can directly integrate with the Bank’s systems and embed the banking solutions such as channel financing, vendor bill/ invoice discounting, payables finance, and factoring within their ERP systems. This can be done either with API integration with the Bank or with a host-to-host SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) solution. The use of these cutting-edge technologies reduces integration time significantly, thereby enhancing the operational and financial efficiencies of the companies significantly.
Speaking on the announcement, Anuj Bhargava, Head- Global Clients Group, ICICI Bank said, “ICICI Bank believes in leveraging the latest technology to bring in new and improved digital banking solutions to its customers. In line with the philosophy, we launched ‘CorpConnect’ last year to help companies and their channel partners with the facility of seamless collection/payment, reconciliation, and financing on a day-to-day basis. We are pleased to share that we have on-boarded 70 leading corporations on ‘CorpConnect’.”
“CorpConnect undertakes average monthly transactions worth a few thousand crores of rupees. We believe that ‘CorpConnect’ has immense potential to simplify the document-intensive supply chain management by bringing all stakeholders on a single platform and providing them with instant, digital and seamless solutions,” it added.